The author who was forced to learn wordplay

Friday 21 September 2007 19.07 EDT
First published on Friday 21 September 2007 19.07 EDT

It may seem counter-intuitive that a major novelist - one with a signature aptitude for verbal virtuosity - should have grown up with language difficulties. But David Mitchell, author of the multivoiced spectacular Cloud Atlas, didn't start talking until he was five. And, if that wasn't enough of a linguistic obstacle, by the time he was seven it was clear that he had a debilitating stammer.

David describes the experience of childhood with a speech impediment as "Beckettian" in its routine mortifications. It served to accentuate the social cringe that came with being a middle-class kid in 80s Worcestershire among the children of farm workers. His own father was a designer for Worcester porcelain, an occupation that David's peers would have considered "poncy". So he adapted himself to the correct idiom and told them a half-truth: that his dad worked in a factory.

The adaptations he made to accommodate his stammer were more extreme. He imagined it as a character, with its own codes of behaviour. In his most recent novel, Black Swan Green, it becomes fictionalised as the presiding officer of missing letters: Hangman. The name was invented for the book, but the strategy was one he really used. "Kids think in these terms," David explains. "It makes sense to assign a personality to something that has such a powerful hold over your life."

Such objectification fits with the scientific consensus that stammering and stuttering more likely derive from a neurological disorder than directly from childhood stress. The British Stammering Association cites research into possible genetic causes, or even evolutionary speculations - a malfunctioning of "fight-flight-freeze" responses - as the most fruitful lines of inquiry. Occurring throughout history and across cultures, David views it as "a complex as old as language itself".

Yet the ways he has sought to accommodate his stammer nevertheless make for knife-edged psychological drama. As a child, he learned to think ahead, spotting potential stammer-words and coming up with similes as he talked. He describes a typical playground scenario in which he has trouble with words that begin with the letter "p". He wants to say "pointless", but can't, so he reaches instead for "futile". The problem then becomes that other kids may laugh at him, so he compensates by lowering the register of the rest of the sentence, roughening it up to obscure the appearance of a posh word.

"And that's what I do now when I write dialogue," he says. "I think about register; I think about the social background of characters, the level of education."

He now views his early word- replacement strategies as somewhat crude. As an adult, he has learned to negotiate an entire constitution of laws by which his stammer operates. But above all he learned that there is no point in trying to fight the Hangman who makes the rules. "The most enduring metaphor for me," he says, "is that my stammer is a person, and it wants to exist, and if I try to stamp it out, it will try to stamp me out."

David describes the key trigger for his stammer as a swarm of thoughts that surround his perception of another person's perception of him stammering. And being acutely aware of how he appears to other people may have had its imaginative compensations. The novel he is currently working on begins in the Shogun period of Japanese history, a police state of such exacting formality that social caste dictated what people were allowed to wear, eat and say. "If you used inappropriate language in 80s Worcestershire, you might get beaten up," David grins. "But you could be executed for using the wrong language in Edo-era Japan."

At a time when the only foreigners allowed into the country were a select handful of Dutch traders, these outsiders appeared so strange to Japanese eyes that rumours spread of how Dutch people walked on their toes, or urinated like dogs.

David's new book opens on a swarm of such perceptions and misperceptions in the encounter of cultures. And he also tackles a technical problem: how to distinguish the way Japanese and Dutch characters speak across languages while writing entirely in English. David's answer is to establish particular rules of speech for particular narrators. One young Japanese woman, telling a first- person story, never uses the word "I". When she refers to herself she says things like, "The tea was drunk by me" or, "My eyes see..."

"I think it works well," David says. "It gives her the humility and self-effacement of a Japanese woman of the era - just through choice of words, through the abolition of the pronoun 'I'.

"And if I say to you, now, 'My stammer helped me do this,' Hangman thinks, 'Cool! Perhaps he doesn't hate me so much after all. Perhaps I'll go easy on him for a while.' "